Why I Still Make Them Stand by the Front Door
Ten years, one patch of concrete, and a countdown I didn't ask for.
Somewhere between making breakfast and packing a lunch, I scribble a grade on a piece of printer paper. Then I make both kids stand in the same spot outside our front door before I let them leave.
They've been standing there for ten years, which is how long we've lived in this house. Same door, same patch of concrete, same hurried handwriting. I do it again on the last day of school and put the two photos side by side, so I can see exactly what changed in a year.
The tradition is older than the house. I started it at our old place the morning my son left for his first day of kindergarten, holding a sign where I spelled it KINDERGARDEN. In my defense, I was making breakfast, packing a lunch, calming a toddler, getting myself ready for work, and thinking of a thousand other things at once, which is the precise state of mind that produces a permanent marker mistake nobody thinks to proofread. He was on his way to go learn how to spell. Clearly one of us needed it more than the other!
My daughter takes the whole thing seriously. She plans the outfit well before the morning of, she tells me which colors to use on her sign, and then she spends the last ten minutes making sure she isn't going to miss the bus. My son is a junior now and drives himself, so he leaves on his own schedule, but he still walks out to that spot and holds up the paper when I tell him to. I'm aware that it has an expiration date on it.
I love this morning. Both of them at the same door, headed into a year that hasn't happened yet, in a grade they've never been in, about to see people they haven't laid eyes on since May. Whatever last year was, this one is still entirely available to them. I'm hopeful for them in a way I don't always manage to be about my own year.
Then they leave, and I stand at the front window and watch, and there is a Kenny Chesney song playing in my head that I did not choose and cannot turn off. "There Goes My Life." Every August, same window, same song, still holding back tears.
Is it possible to be relieved and heartbroken about the same morning?
Yes, and I've stopped trying to put them in order.
Chad and I both work from home, so all summer the workday gets interrupted about every forty minutes by somebody who needs a ride or needs food or needs to ask me something that could have waited. When school starts, all of that stops, and I get my hours and my routine back, which is a relief I'm not going to pretend I don't feel.
But I truly loved having them in the house. Summer was vacations and sleepovers and sports camps and doctor's appointments, all of it juggled, and now that's done until next year. I complained about the running around the entire time it was happening. I'd do every bit of it again next week if I could.
How long have I been counting down?
I've been counting since he started high school. Two more first days at that front door, and then I'm the one posting a picture from a dorm room, standing in a doorway that isn't mine, in a town I'll have to drive to, the way I keep watching my friends do.
He started driving in January. People warned me about that. They told me I'd stop seeing him, and they were right. Between practice and his job and a social life that no longer requires me as transportation, he's simply gone more than he's here. Everyone framed the license as freedom, and it is, for him. On my end, it works as a preview of what the house sounds like later. I'm holding on for dear life over here, and he's fine, which is the whole point and also the hard part.
I'm a planner by nature and by trade, and planning has carried me through things far heavier than this one. It does nothing at all here. There's no getting ahead of it and no version of it I can organize into something easier, because he's supposed to leave. Wanting him to stay and wanting him to go aren't in conflict with each other. They just both show up every August while I'm hunting through a drawer for a marker.
I spent years assuming I had to pick one of these and that the other one meant something was wrong with me. Excited about the school year, so the sadness must be self-indulgent. Relieved about the routine, so the grief can't be real. It has never worked that way for me, and I've quit trying to make it.
And when he's gone, my daughter will still be out there. Still planning the outfit days ahead, still telling me which colors to use on her sign, still standing at the same door while I take her picture. I get more of those, and will probably start her countdown soon as well.
So I take a bad photo in a hurry, with a homemade sign, in front of a door that hasn't changed in a decade while the kids standing at it change every single year, and there are two more of these with him in the frame.
In May, I'll walk them back out to the same spot and see what this year did.
Jessi Bixler is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the author of The Story We Share (Next Thing Press, 2025), a memoir about the ripple effects of sexual assault through a family and the systems that respond to harm. She speaks to leadership audiences and advocacy organizations on what people carry and how it shapes how we lead.
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